USB Drive Failure Wolverhampton

“Excellent service, keeping us updated and well informed during a stressful time. Thanks to the rapid turnaround, we were still able to deploy our latest marketing strategy on time. Would thoroughly recommend to anyone else who suffers a computer hardware failure.”

Raylene Wilkins, RLW Productions Ltd, Wolverhampton

From Wolverhampton we received a Seagate Backup Plus Slim external USB drive at our laboratory in Oxford. Our hardware specialists examined the drive and found that the Samsung 1TB drive contained within the enclosure had suffered a read/write head failure due to stiction. The most common reason for this to happen is due to the drive being disconnected while operating, which can sometimes lead to the heads not returning to the parking zone.

If the read/write heads stop while located in the area of the platters, they will collapse and settle onto the surface at which point they will stick; known as stiction. It is the act of the disk platters spinning which creates a cushion of air which keeps the read/write heads floating at the designated height. If the drive is powered up after the read/write heads have stuck to the platters the disk will most likely either not spin or destroy the reads. Our engineers were able to overcome the problem and take a sector-by-sector image of the drive, which contained a couple of thousand unreadable sectors.

An analysis by our data recovery specialists of the image taken of the drive, found an NTFS volume of 1TB, containing approximately 520GB of various files, including documents, photos and video presentations. The bad sectors, fortunately did not affect any of the vitally important files, allowing a full recovery of the required files, which were returned on a new USB drive.